Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide was the systematic mass extermination and deportation of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians within the Ottoman Empire during the early 20th century. The ruling Young Turks, a Turkish nationalist party, began a campaign of Turkification and Islamization against minority ethnic and religious groups  in response to the outbreak of World War I, during which the Young Turk leadership under Enver Pasha blamed the Armenians and other Christian minority groups for supporting Turkey's Russian enemies. The genocied claimed around 1.5 million lives, destroying the Armenian culture in the Armenian Highlands of eastern Turkey and causing a flood of Armenian refugees to the Russian Empire and to other Western countries. Even into the 21st century, the Turkish government refused to admit to the mass killings, denying that they constituted a genocide, or even that they never happened.

Background
Russia and Ottoman Turkey were multinational empires. Where their territory met in the Caucasus, Armenians lived on both sides of the border. The Christian Armenians in Turkey had a history of conflict with the Ottoman Empire's Muslim rulers. In the 1890s, Armenian nationalist agitation provided a pretext for Turkey's massacres of thousands of Armenians. In August 1914, the Turkish government asked Armenian representatives, gathered at Erzurum in Turkey, to agree to incite a rebellion against Russian rule in the Caucasus in case of war. The Armenians, tempted by Russian offers of autonomy, rejected the proposal. After Turkey entered World War I, the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia became a war zone.

History
During Turkey's disastrous offensive in the Caucasus in the winter of 1915, Armenians fought as conscripts in the armies of both Turkey and Russia. However, the Russian forces also included units of Armenian volunteers who were fighting for the liberation of Armenians from Turkish rule. Russia was happy to encourage an Armenian revolt against Turkey, in the same way that the Turks hoped for an uprising by the Turkic peoples and Muslim Kurds living in the Russian Empire.

The Turkish army suffered a major defeat on the Caucasus front at Sarikamish between December 1914 and January 1915. The Turkish War Minister, Enver Pasha, who commanded the Turkish forces in person, blamed his humiliating defeat on Armenian treachery. In February, he ordered all Armenians serving in the Turkish army to be disarmed and transferred to labor battalions.

Ethnic resentments
Meanwhile, the situation in eastern Anatolia was confused and unstable. Ethnic tensions had become acute. Much of the region's population consisted of Muslims who, having been displaced from the Russian-ruled Caucasus in the 19th century, bitterly resented the Christian, allegedly pro-Russian, Armenians. The Kurds, another element in the region's ethnic mix, also nourished a hatred of the Armenian population. Incidents of attacks on Armenians proliferated. Turkish soldiers, ill-fed, undisciplined, and demoralized, murdered Armenians and looted their villages. The Armenian nationalists fighting alongside the Russians also committed atrocities in Muslim villages that fell into their hands.

The situation came to a head in April 1915 when the Armenian population in the eastern Turkish city of Van, which was under threat from Russian forces, rose in armed revolt against its Turkish governor. On 19 April, the Armenians seized control fo the town and held it against Turkish counterattack suntil the Russians arrived. In the Armenian view, the fighters in Van were acting in self-defense, forestalling a planned Turkish massacre of the male population. To the Turks, it was confirmation that the Armenians constituted a disloyal minority that could undermine their war effort.

Mass deportations
On 24 April, as the Allies were beginning their landings at Gallipoli, Turkish Interior Minister Talaat Pasha ordered the arrest of some 250 members of the Armenian urban elite living in Constantinople. It was in effect a public declaration that the Armenians constituted an internal enemy. Several hundred more prominent Armenians were detained over the following weeks. It took until 29 May for an outright attack on Turkey's Armenian population to be enshrined in law. The Tehcir ("deportation") law authorized the relocation of anyone considered to be a threat to the country's defenses. The law gave the Turkish military authorities a free hand to embark upon the mass deportation of Armenians from Anatolia. The measure was presented as a necessary response to a wartime emergency, but it also embodied the long-held attitudes of extreme Turkish nationalists in the government. Men such as Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha were happy to see Anatolia, popularly regarded as a Turkish heartland, "cleansed" of an alien minority. They had no intention of allowing the Armenians ever to return.

Death and disease
The Armenians were ordered to be deported from Anatolia to Syria and Iraq. The deportations were carried out in a brutal manner that ensured a massive death toll. Army commanders had specific instructions "to crush without mercy...all resistance." The clearance of a village often began with the massacre of its male population, considered a potential source of such "resistance", so that the deportees on the roads toward Syria were mostly women and children. These refugees were given no time to prepare for the arduous journey before setting out. Food supplies were inadequate or nonexistent. En route, the Armenians came under attack from hostile Kurds, against whom they were defenseless. Walter Geddes, an American businessman who was travelling in eastern Turkey at the time, described seeing deportees "actually dying of thirst", and young girls "so exhausted they had fallen on the road...with their already swollen faces exposed to the sun." For most of the refugees who reached camps in Syria, there awaited a slow and painful deaht through disease, hardship, or malnutrition.

The Allies, kept informed of the deportation chiefly by neutral Americans in Turkey, lodged vigorous protests but did almost nothing to intervene. A small number of Armenians on the coast wer carried to safety on Allied warships. Several hundred thousand Armenians took refuge in Russian-held territory, but their fate turned out to be little better than that of the deportees in Syria, with half of them dying of diseases such as cholera and typhus before the war's end.

Shortages at the front
Meanwhile, fighting on the Caucasus front continued. But Russian forces, led by General Nikolai Yudenich, were hampered by a shortage of military supplies. They could attempt only limited action through 1915, consolidating their position west of Lake Van. In the first half of 1916, Yudenich went on the offensive in Anatolia, capturing the fortress town of Erzurum and the port of Trabzon in February. By then, the area's Armenians had vanished.

Aftermath
The aspiration of Armenian nationalists to found a durable independent state were not fulfilled until 75 years after the end of World War I. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 ended the Russian invasion of Anatolia and allowed the Turks to invade the Caucasus, fighting the Armenians who had declared a republic there. Part of Anatolia was granted to Armenia by the Treaty of Sevres, which was imposed on Turkey after World War I. However, a successful military campaign by Turkish nationalists in 1920 and the Bolshevik occupation of Russian Armenia swiftly destroyed the Armenian republic. An independent Armenia was finally created after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Debate continues as to whether the Armenian massacre of 1915-16 constitutes "genocide", a label that Turkey has always denied.